At 01:03 PM 11/8/2007, andrew holway wrote:
>Im still not convinced, bang for buck your going to get more
>clustering this junk than buying commodity hardware. Benchmarks at the
>ready.
>>Andy
No question there..
However, if you want a low capital investment toy cluster to learn
on, the $200 node is quite attractive.
For instance, say you had a class of 10 people wanting to learn about
cluster design and admin. You could go and get a big cluster and
install the necessary management tools to let them share the cluster,
or use an already existing cluster. OTOH, you could also buy 10 $2K
clusters, and let them have at it on their very own. They'll learn
all the things about cluster admining, rebuilding images, etc.
For this kind of thing, raw performance isn't important, number of
nodes is, because there's a qualitative difference between running a
standalone machine and running a group of N>3 machines that have to
talk. Somewhere around 5-10 computers, brute force techniques to
install software like sneakernet start to really break down.